Sept. 15, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
421 
especially to a fly-fisherman. His fondness for 
the fly-fisherman would not alter the case one 
bit. Some men are captains of finance and 
others great statesmen, but the Old Angler laid 
his sole claim to posterity on his record of hav¬ 
ing caught more big trout than had ever been 
caught by any other man in the State. He was 
getting pretty well on in years now. and each 
season saw him more ambitious than ever to be 
reckoned with when records were being made. 
The four days’ trip was nearly over and the 
Young Angler was still behind. The last after¬ 
noon had come, and he must win out in the next 
six hours or permit the Old Angled to wear the 
laurels of another season. All through the trip 
fortune had favored the Old Angler until his 
confident and aggressive air of superiority had 
become almost unbearable. If the Young Angler 
could end up the trip, which was the last one of 
the season, with a record-breaking catch, life 
would not have been spent in vain. 
It was a perfect afternoon for fly-fishing. 
There had been several sharp dashes of rain 
during the morning, but by mid-day the rain had 
subsided to a soft drizzle. There was no wind 
and the bunches of white fog hung almost 
motionless in the hollows and against the deep 
green of the mountain sides. There were no 
natural flies on the water, and the Young 
Angler expected the trout to rise greedily. The 
dark day would make it possible for him to use 
his largest and brightest flies, and so increase his 
chances not only of rising big trout, but of hold¬ 
ing them when hooked. The water under the 
low, heavy clouds was almost black and seemed 
to extend anglers an invitation to seek for 
prizes in its depths. 
After a comfortable dinner, a boy from the 
hotel took the Young Angler down the road 
in the blackboard and left him at Lewis Riffle. 
'This is really more than a riffle; it is a rapid, as 
is most of the swift water in this great stream 
that comes down from among the mountains in 
the north, and that has been a famous trout 
stream since the time of the Indians' occupa¬ 
tion of the country. The riffle is more than a 
hundred yards long, and where the water runs 
swiftly over the uneven rocky bottom, it rises 
and falls in billows nearly a foot high. The 
Young Angler found it stiff wading to cross the 
head of the riffle, and come at the little beach 
on the edge of the long eddy that is always 
found on one side or the other of such water. 
He began to fish at the very top of the riffle, 
casting diagonally across the stream, so that the 
current swept his flies down and back on a taut 
line. He had worked thoroughly two-thirds of the 
riffle, when a brown trout fully twenty inches 
long and half a foot broad rose and took the 
dropper fly that had been bouncing from crest 
to crest like a live insect just starting to fly. 
The trout rose into the very top of the billow, 
and the Young Angler could see its color and 
size as plainly as through plate glass. When 
hooked it sank to the bottom and then came so 
swiftly up stream that the angler could not take 
inr line fast enough, and in ten seconds it was 
loose. But then the water was so swift and the 
fish so enormous that he never could have held 
it anyway, and he was thankful to save his tackle. 
He finished the riffle with three ten-inch trout 
to the good. 
At the Mountain Hole a current running 
smoothly and rapidly as through the chute in a 
dam plows it way into the head of a large cir¬ 
cular pool. A wide eddy on the left and bushes 
that interfere with his back-cast forced him to 
work down the middle of the stream in the stiff 
current until he could reach the comparatively 
easy water, where the bottom shelved off 
abruptly into the depths of the pool. The cur¬ 
rent was so strong that the water piled up be¬ 
hind him and shoved until the small, round 
stones rolled under his wading shoes. But he 
was vigorous and active and an expert wader, 
and he held his ground until he rose and hooked 
on the tail fly, a big, brown-hackle, a sixteen- 
inch, broad, pink-sided, brook trout with a wide, 
square tail. It took the fly quietly, but when 
hooked it made a leap clear of the water and 
showed itself in all its beauty of coloring and 
proportion. Before he could work back up the 
current for a firmer footing, so that he might 
swing his trout into the eddy, a second trout 
that could have been smaller by not more than 
an inch took the dropper fly. When he finally 
reached the bar at the head of the pool he found, 
somewhat to his relief, that the big trout was 
gone, but he was bitterly disappointed when, 
after a few minutes’ play with the smaller trout, 
it, too, broke loose. It had doubtless loosened 
the fly while it had the big trout to pull against. 
This pool yielded him for his basket a single 
trout a foot long. 
When he reached the pool called the Cold 
Watch, a boy was wading the broad, shallow 
riffle at its head, catching chubs for eel bait, 
and when asked whether or not he had caught 
any trout, he said he did not fish for trout; 
“Pap and Mam wouldn’t eat ’em.” The Young 
Angler began his casting over under the high 
wall of rock at the mountain’s foot, where a 
stronger current gave some little motion to the 
water. He had put on a big coachman in place 
of a stone fly, and he could see its white wings 
riding the surface of the deep, black water when 
fifty feet away. He had fished all of the likely 
water, and was finally fishing the pool some 
seventy-five feet below the riffle, where the 
depth must have been fifteen feet, when a great 
wide trout rolled over on top of the water and 
struck the coachman with a mighty thud. He 
could not tell the length of the trout, for he had 
seen only its round, red side as it curved over the 
fly, but he knew that it was second in size only 
to the brown trout of Lewis Riffle. He could 
not have asked for a better place to hook a 
Tig trout. The pool was so broad and deep and 
clear of all obstructions, the current was so 
gentle, and the landing place so gradual and 
smooth that he need only hold his fish until ex¬ 
hausted and then tow it quietly to his net. But 
the joint of the hook must have struck the bony 
rim of the big mouth instead of the tough 
g; istle at the corner or under the tongue, for with 
a few heavy tugs the fish was gone, and he was 
forced to leave this pool without a trout, while 
the boy kept on a-fishing. 
He had one more chance on the Hess riffle 
before it was too dark to see his cast, and here 
fortune favored him, although nteagerly, to his 
thinking. About half way down the riffle Buf¬ 
falo Rock, a round, white granite boulder, as big 
as an omnibus, lay just in the edge of the stream 
at the bottom of a low bank. The current had 
scooped out a deep, short pool just on the out¬ 
side of the boulder, and in this pool he hooked 
a fifteen-inch trout that he was compelled liter¬ 
ally to drag, without any preliminary playing, 
up the four-foot bank to his feet on the bar 
above. Where he had expected a small fish to 
rise, a big one had come with a rush, and had 
hooked itself so firmly that it took some time 
to extract the hook. This riffle added two 
other trout of medium size to his catch, and then 
the afternoon was over. But the fragrance of 
the ferns and the wet woods, the murmuring of 
the stream and the plaintive whistle of the whip- 
poor-will, and the solemn grandeur and the 
lonely beauty of his beloved mountains in the 
deepening twilight had no charms for him as he 
went plodding up the muddy road to the hotel. 
Oh, if he could have’ but held two of the four 
big trout! Was it not foolish always to say that 
the big trout get away? Why, of course, they 
get away. Their chances of escape increase as 
the cube of their length in inches. He had put 
all of his skill and knowledge into the struggle 
and still lost four trout out of the five. The 
contest was not a fair one. 
The Old Angler came in an hour late that 
evening, and in his basket were a twenty-inch 
brown trout and three thick, heavy brook trout 
that measured respectively fifteen, sixteen and 
eighteen inches. Where had he caught them, did 
they want «to know? Why he had caught the 
brown trout on Lewis Riffle, the eighteen-inch 
trout at the Cold Watch and the other two at 
the Mountain Hole. Did he have any trouble 
landing them? Why, of course not. When a 
trout that was big enough to swallow a minnow 
bit for him it was headed straight for the frying- 
pan. And what did they think? Some fool fly- 
fisherman had hooked and lost every one of 
the four trout not more than an hour before he 
had come along to rescue them from such kind 
of fishing. Fly-fishermen ought to fish runs and 
not the big streams where they just make the 
trout mad. Had any one beaten his record for 
the day? with a sly glance at the Young Angler; 
if not, he was still the champion trout fisherman 
of his part of the State. 
The Young Angler said little about the trout 
that he had caught and less about those he had 
lost. Maybe, it was all right that the Old 
Angler was still the champion. He thought his 
years for fishing were getting few and his ac¬ 
tivity and endurance were fast waning, while 
for himself, he was just coming into his prime 
and had before him many great days of curling 
waters and leaping trout when, perhaps, the big 
ones would not all get away. 
Chas. Lose. 
New York Casting Tournament. 
The Anglers’ Club of New York wifi hold an 
open fly and bait-casting tournament in New 
York Oct. 12 and 13. For the purpose it is an¬ 
ticipated that permission can be obtained from 
Commissioner Herrman of the Park Depart¬ 
ment, to hold the tournament on Harlem Mere, 
in Central Park, as the pool, where the club 
practice casting is held, is not suitable for such 
an affair, and the park authorities would not 
consent to the attraction of a large crowd of 
contestants and spectators to the shores of this 
little lake, because of the damage likely to result 
to the grass and shrubbery. Harlem Mere is 
larger, more open, and granitoid walks are near 
the water’s edge, so that it is an ideal location 
for the holding of a tournament. 
It is announced that John Enright, of Castle- 
connell, Ireland, one of the world’s most famous' 
fly-casters, and Walter D. Mansfield, of the San 
Francisco Fly-Casting Club, and holder of the 
record for long distance tournament fly-casting, 
will be in New York city at the time of the 
tournament. As Reuben Leonard and E. J. Mills 
are anxious to compete with other noted anglers 
for the salmon fly-casting record, it is the hope 
of the Anglers' Club to bring these and other 
casters into competition, and to this end hand¬ 
some prizes will be offered, while the bass and 
trout fly-casters, and the bait-casters will not be 
overlooked. 
At the September business meeting of the club 
action will be taken to affiliate with the National 
Association of Scientific Angling Clubs, recently 
organized, and the rules governing the club's 
tournament will be those of the national body. 
Circulars are being prepared, giving the de¬ 
tails of the coming tournament, and these may 
be obtained from G. M. L. LaBranche, 30 Broad 
street, or the Secretary. Perry D. Frazer, 
Forest and Stream, 346 Broadway, New York 
city. 
A Connecticut 250-Pound Tarpon. 
New London, Conn., Sept. 7 .—Editor Forest 
and Stream: The inclosed is a clipping from the 
New London Day of the above date: 
"Nianlic, Sept. 7.—Capt. Edward Horton caught 
a tarpon in his fish trap near Crescent beach 
Thursday. This species of the finny tribe is very 
uncommon in the waters in this vicinity, but are 
found quite plentiful in southern waters, es¬ 
pecially in the Gulf of Mexico. This specimen 
weighed 250 pounds and measured seven feet in 
length and was well proportioned. A sample of 
the scales taken from this monster fish are on 
exhibition at Captain Horton’s market. They are 
as large as the palm of a man’s hand. The big 
fish was cut up and used for bait after being 
photographed by Captain Horton.” 
1 do not vouch for the truth of it, but if it 
be true, think it is the record. At least I never 
heard of one of that weight before, nor have I 
ever heard of one being taken so far north. 
J. Robert Mead. 
Barnegat Bay Striped Bass 6 
Sunset Inn, Barnegat City, N. J.. Sept. 3.— 
Mr. Dam, of New York, to-day caught twenty- 
two striped bass, all good size, in Barnegat 
Bay. J. H. R. 
